At the doctor's office today, my mom-in-law tells me, "He was speaking in whole sentences at nine months old."
Then she tells me about the phone call she got from his teachers, after they tested his IQ far into the genius range, and how he went to Gifted and Talented classes.
I say, "It can be intimidating."
She nods yes.
You can make your whole life a set of lists, every day a list to make you feel good. Tonight I would feel best if I could write,
Today I went to the doctor and put away dishes and picked up the living room and bedroom and went to Ikea and bought a bed frame, called my mother and father, read 25 pages of a book while laying on my left side like the doctor said, watched no TV, vacuumed the living room, ironed shirts and did a load of laundry, emptied the bathroom trash, cleaned up the baby's room, made a list of baby supplies needed, registered at Babies R Us like I have been telling people I would for a month now, ate lean protein every three hours, swam fifty laps in the pool, showered and blow dried my hair and put on makeup, went to the grocery store, cooked for four, picked up Mr. Aran from work looking like someone he might want to date, ate dinner, washed dishes, played some WoW, gave Mr. Aran a nice BJ, went to bed early.
For a Type A person, the list is necessary. For the ADD sufferer, the list is a godsend. To the Type A, ADD person, the list is your life. You may deviate from the list, but if you ignore the list, you will feel like shit at the end of the day and you will have some splaining to do, even if no one asks. Even if no one notices that nothing got done. You'll still explain why; you'll still apologize.
***
Fuck a duck, I'm tired.
***
My bathing suit fits fine and moves alright in the water. How I look in it is not an issue. It was the easiest bathing suit shopping I've ever done. I went into the badly lit dressing room knowing the results wouldn't be pretty and having a good excuse for that. I'm still self-conscious in it. If someone is also at the pool, I just float on my back. I don't want them to think I'm doing real laps, because I don't swim right. I could swim before I walked, but I don't like my face in the water. I don't like the burning up my nose or in my eyes, so I keep my head out. I don't know why I give a shit about other people's opinions of my swimming skill.
When I hang my suit to dry in the shower, it looks bigger than God. I panic in the back of my throat because it reminds me of my enormous grandmother's suits hanging in the bathrooms of my youth. She weighs many pounds, more than three hundred, but her suits have these little frilly skirt things that, I suppose, are supposed to trick the eye into believing she is a svelte one hundred. But if you stuck a pole under the middle of one of her suits, children could camp in it.
My suit isn't that big, but I only just got used to bikinis.
Floating on my back is nice, though. It's good to feel like you don't have to hold everything up.
***
Here's the fun stuff. I am about thirty-two weeks along. The kid, however, is not on the same schedule. His head and femurs are more than thirty-four weeks along. His belly is about thirty-one weeks. So he's this tall, skinny guy with a big head which likes to knock against my very sensitive cervix and cause me pain. He's upside down, ready to exit when all systems are go. He still has a penis. I have a picture of it. I don't see anything in the picture but the doctor sounded pretty damn sure of himself.
***
My ma ditched me this weekend. I'm not surprised. She makes bad choices as a general rule. She arrived in Vegas on Saturday for her friend's birthday with a bad chest cold, and immediately ordered drinks. When I called, I mentioned that she sounded like she'd been drinking. She took a drag on her cigarette and said, "I have NOT been drinking. I've only had three beers."
Ma is one of those alcoholics who make up these rules that justify their problem, who goes to the AA meetings and figures it isn't for her because she's nowhere near as bad as THOSE people. Beers don't start to count until the twelfth, and if you can kareoke, you can drive. You only really get drunk on shots and wine drinkers are pussies. If the mixed drink is sweet, it doesn't count.
Her plan, at first, was for me to meet her in Vegas. I hate Vegas when I'm not eight months pregnant. Ixnay on that idea from minute one.
Plan B was to attend the wedding and then drive to visit me. Ixnay on that idea, as she does not want to drive that far. She wanted me to meet her somewhere. I suggested Ontario, where my inlaws live. There's also a Babies R Us there and an outlet mall and a bunch of restaurants and it's a bit closer to Vegas than I am. The wedding is Sunday, so I assume she'll drive out after the wedding, hook up with a place to stay the night, meet me on Monday...
...insert the sound of a screeching halt here. She's supposed to be going home on Monday. Did I mention that she fucking DROVE from Colorado?
It didn't occur to her that this would not work out, timewise. This is how my mother thinks, or does not think. It's impossible to plan around her. With her measley three beers in her, she begins to weep when I say, "Ma, I don't think this is going to work out the way you think it will."
She calls back a few hours later and tells me I am the main reason for her trip. She just has to see me pregnant, it has to happen, so she will not be leaving early Monday morning, she will leave Monday afternoon. Good to go. That way she can drive out on Sunday night, get a place to stay, have...
...more screeching halt.
Oh no, no. Staying a little longer means she'll be able to attend the reception and post-reception party, come out early early Monday morning and meet me for lunch.
I say fine. I will be in Ontario on Monday. Call when you're close, Ma, and I'll give you directions. I do not hold my breath.
Monday, I wake at 5:40 a.m. for my fourth bathroom trip of the night and figure it's useless to go back to sleep. I shower, dress, and send an email to my Marine brother thanking him for his service to our country on this Memorial Day. When my husband wakes, we get bagels and take a beautiful, traffic-free drive to Ontario, where I take a walk with my dad-in-law and his dog and I tell him that my mother makes me crazy. Then I rest until the stores open and on our way out, my phone rings.
Holy macaroni, did my mother really party all day Sunday, drink smoke drink drink smoke smoke kareoke drink smoke gamble drink drink, then truly get up and out by 6:00 a.m. to drive to California to meet up with me, her self-proclaimed priority on this trip? I'm ready to take back all the mean things I said about her, to congratulate her on her renewed sense of responsibility, but then I hear her voice. She's obviously just awakened. Her mouth sounds stuffed with cotton. This is the sound of a very, very bad hangover.
"I have a fever," she tells me, "and my glands are so swollen and I can't move..."
The way nobody tells my enormous grandmother that her knees are bad because of her weight and not because once in 1983 she got on a treadmill that ruined them, that's the same way I don't tell my mother that alcohol, along with the mid-summer Vegas tendency to go from blistering heat to freezing air conditioner, along with a long road trip and lack of sleep, is the best way for a little chest cold to turn into something much worse really really fast.
The way I ignored the oxygen tanks and guttural hacking coughs belonging to various grandfathers and granduncles over the years of my life, I do not mention that smoking menthol while sick does not really help.
It used to make me mad. I used to scream in her face. God, I want my mom back, the maybe-fake mom I had when I was a kid. She wasn't ever perfect, but she was my mom. I didn't have to give her advice, I didn't have to worry about her. And now that I'm having this kid, I feel like I'm overboard in a very still, calm but dark ocean. There is no number for me to call and whine that I am tired and lazy and overwhelmed and I don't know what to do, because my mother is inevitably worse off than I am and my mom-in-law is so dignified, so stoic, she's more like the sweet-faced statue of a mother than a real, snuggly mother to whom I can cry.
I don't scream at my mom anymore. It never has worked and it won't work today.
***
You ever read Flowers for Algernon? It makes me want to just crawl under the tile and die.
***
I've been thinking of this Ondaatje poem since hitting month eight.
DATES
It becomes apparent that I miss great occasions.
My birth was heralded by nothing
but the anniversary of Winston Churchill's marriage.
No monuments bled, no instruments
agreed on a specific weather.
It was a seasonal insignificance.
I console myself with my mother's eighth month.
While she sweated out her pregnancy in Ceylon
a servant ambling over the lawn
with a tray of iced drinks,
a few friends visiting her
to placate her shape, and I
drinking the life lines,
Wallace Stevens sat down in Connecticut
a glass of orange juice at his table
so hot he wore only shorts
and on the back of a letter
began to write 'The Well Dressed Man with a Beard.'
That night while my mother slept
her significant belly cooled
by the bedroom fan
Stevens put words together
that grew to sentences
and shaved them clean and
shaped them, the page suddenly
becoming thought where nothing had been,
his head making his hand
move where he wanted
and he saw his hand was saying
the mind is never finished, no, never
and I in my mother's stomach was growing
as were the flowers outside the Connecticut windows.
***
If you are not that in awe of the writing process, you aren't a writer.
***
I'm sorry this was so long.
My life is not full of gloom, aches, pains. I know a chick who has not one positive thing to say, ever. She is not happy unless drama is a-happening. She cannot derive pleasure from peace.
[Injected note: The more I think of this, the more chicks I know like this.]
Drama makes for interesting writing, though, so this will be short.
This morning, I had a really good bagel with cream cheese, with a decaf latte and a few Ranier cherries, for breakfast at my table. The table has a real tablecloth and placemats on it now, and it looks awesome. I haven't had a dining table before and it kind of rules.
I woke up earlier than usual. Outside, the air had a nice chill. At Starbucks, I said good morning to someone who smiled at me.
People who meet me from reading my writing don't like me so much. I have an unattractive smile, but I can't help it most of the time. I laugh like crazy. I do this Mel Brooks humor thing where I just rapid-fire jokes out, hoping something will hit, make you laugh.
Last night, we went to our first childbirth prep class. It was rad. Our teacher is hilarious. We've been lucky enough to have funny teachers for most of these things couples have to do - like the marriage prep Catholic class; that was fucking funny, too. So, anyhow, we sat in the back last night like the class clowns and cackled at everything, made fun of everyone under our breath, especially Mister Know-It-All who insisted that a woman's strong urge to push during Transition could be abated if she just told her body to relax.
Thousands of years of birthing and this guy thinks women will just slap their foreheads, widen their eyes, cry out, "Holy shit, you're right! What the hell are we doing practicing all this breathing?"
I'm no good at writing funny. That's much harder than being funny, or writing drama. So I'll quit now.
Everyone, you have a great day. I'm planning on it.
Last night, I told Mister Aran that I didn't think I loved the baby yet, that mostly I was scared of him.
I was hoping he'd argue, tell me I was in love with the baby, or maybe that when I had the baby, then all the emotion would come crashing in and I'd get it. I've been told this, by women.
Mister Aran didn't say anything.
***
Nothing pisses me off more than a single, working woman in her forties going through thousands of dollars worth of fertility treatments and donor sperm so she can experience childbirth. I say childbirth, not motherhood, because putting a newborn in day care when you don't have to is not motherhood.
Maybe it pisses me off worse, to know there are women who leave their small children behind so they can go live in other states with their internet boyfriends. You'll never convince them that they aren't heroes. That they haven't been victimized at every turn.
***
Nothing confuses me more than a nurse working in an infant's intensive care ward who injects the babies with heparin, so that they'll have baby-sized heart attacks and cardiac arrests.
So everyone can come watch her save them.
Every once in awhile, of course, she wouldn't be able to save them. Blood would come out of every little needle prick that had been made in the baby's skin, and he'd die. It sounds like a horror story, to me, but it happened. If the woman had been just an inch smarter, she'd be working today. But it must get addictive. After she injected the first baby, maybe there was a rush from all the doctors and nurses telling her what a hero she was for saving him. If she'd been able to do it only every once in awhile, maybe she would never have gotten caught.
In her next job, working with a pediatrician, she switched to an injected muscle relaxant that made all the muscles go instantly soft. The babies would go limp in her arms.
When the muscle relaxant started to wear off, the muscles would twitch involuntarily. She called these seizures. She saved them from these, too.
In such a small town, people must want to trust others. They must want it bad. After half a dozen babies went limp while alone with this nurse, then suffered seizures, shouldn't people have questioned it? Instead, she became a local hero.
Until a baby girl died.
***
It occurred to me two nights ago that my baby boy might look like me. I realize I'm doing this all backward. Most people have babies because they want someone around who looks like them. I've daydreamed about a boy who looks like Mister Aran - the thought of it breaks my heart - but I never considered that the kid might resemble me.
I think of myself now as his mother. I belong to him, now. I've been ready to kill or die for him since I first imagined I might be pregnant.
I am only today thinking of him as my baby. My son.
***
He moves around pretty fiercely these days. Big, strong movements, annoyed kinds of movements. Like beating your fists into hard pillows; like thrashing around in bed on a hot night. Like banging on a door.
***
The first time I got pregnant, it didn't work. There's a scientific explanation for it, but I think I wasn't ready. The world wasn't ready. Things needed to happen. Maybe fate isn't all that secure and reliable. Maybe it tries things out and then fails.
Back then, the night before the surgery that would end it for good, I held my hand over the lowest part of my belly, where nothing was living, and whispered, "Come back again. I'll be ready next time."
At six weeks this time, when I went to the hospital to get my first ultrasound, I was ready. I'd been there before, in that same ultrasound room, so I didn't know things worked out okay in that room sometimes. I laid there, not even worried, not even tense, just ready for the technician to call in the radiologist to tell me that it wasn't going to work out, again.
Instead, there was the boy. My son. Looking like a tiny bean, or shrimp, with his heart going wild. You see that for the first time, it just looks hard. It looks like more work than you'd be willing to put in. You've never seen something more determined than a microscopic shrimp with a bang bang heartbeat who is damn ready to become a human being.
***
When I was a kid, I went to a church where the adults were sometimes known to have sex with the kids. None of the adults in my family did this, but some of them had suffered at the other end of it when they were kids, themselves. My mother was one of them.
Why we still went there, that's a story for another time.
But my mother, she was afraid this would happen to her kids. So she taught us something I can't shake now, in my own adulthood: respect is earned.
That meant, if an adult wanted you to get naked for them, or wanted you to do something that made you feel uncomfortable, you didn't have to do it just because you respect your elders.
Now, I don't respect anyone right off the bat. And since, for my personality type, respect and love are so close, I don't just love at first sight either. There has to be evidence; people have to prove themselves. It's a way of thinking that has saved me from a lot of evil.
***
When people talk about having a psychic connection to someone else, part of me wants to roll my eyes. I used to get this talk from a fruity, patchouli-stink hippie girl in college. Pretty much everything she said back then makes me roll my eyes now.
***
The babies come out still attached to you, and not breathing. Until then, they've been a fish. Then they suffocate until they decide to breathe, then someone gets in there with the scissors and cuts you two apart for the first time.
It's too tough to think about, so I'm going to stop.
WW
Here's how it works. You go into a Jewish temple lit low, mostly by the dimming light from outside, after work on a Thursday. You're directed to a brown folding table and a form and a pen. You forget the information you ink in. You pay some money. There is a special going on so all you have to pay is that week's fees, about ten dollars. You are given a little thick paper booklet plus some colorful small books and you get in line. You take off your shoes. In line in front of you are other people, mostly women, taking off their shoes, standing on the scales, and beyond that, putting on their shoes. From another room, you hear the low echoing murmur of women talking in a big room.
You go to the scale certain that you will be turned away, your ten dollars and change refunded, because you are surely too thin for this. You are not like the land whales who half-waddle, half-swim their way to the big room, clutching their little booklets and talking about last week's bad choices. But, at the scale, you are surprised by the number. This is the hardest day, because you've been lying to yourself a long time. Later you find out that almost everyone in the room lied to themselves to some extent. They shopped rarely and alone or from catalogues. They avoided mirrors and cameras and the doctor's office. They all have the trigger story: the thing that made them come in or come back. The photo at someone's wedding. The dress that wouldn't zip no matter how they held their breath. The comment made by a child at the supermarket. The heart attack.
A lady with short, tight brown curls writes the number down in your little book without comment. You put on your shoes. You join the women and sprinkling of men in the next room.
There is another number next to the big number in your booklet. It's your next weight loss goal: ten percent of your weight. Only after that do you get to start thinking about the big goal.
Every food, depending on their fat, fiber and caloric content, has a point value. You get 24 a day, and 20 extra per week to use how you like. Some of the women get more points a day, because they weigh more. Some get less, because they weigh less. This makes no sense to you, because you think you should be rewarded for weight loss, not penalized. This is how your brain works: food is reward.
You forget what they talk about at the meeting. After the meeting, you have to sit and listen to another speech detailing the program. Then you go home and write down everything you ate that day. You look up the points values in your books and write those down next to the foods. Then you do the math.
The first week is hard. You're hungry a lot. You have to figure it out, how not to run out of points before ten a.m., what foods you really need and then you realize how much you eat when you're not paying attention, and that's a lot. Then you substitute out some foods you don't care about much with other foods that cost less points, and then eventually you find that little corner of the frozen food section with the diet desserts.
Next meeting, you have lost five pounds, so you get a bookmark and everyone claps for you. After that, you lose less: a pound or two a week. Certain weeks every month are tougher than others. There's always a week after menstruation when you lose more. There is a frustrating three week period, months later, when you stay the exact same weight, down to the tenth of a pound, even though you go to the bathroom before every weigh-in and weigh before breakfast on Saturdays. The fourth week, you lose four pounds.
A few weeks in, they tell you about activity points: points you earn for exercise, though they'd never call it exercise. People have bad connotations of the word, especially the land whales who were fat during gym class, fat during the Jazzercise era, fat during the yoga era, fat during Oprah's ups and downs. Some of these middle-aged ladies, they hear "exercise" and they think twenty-year olds in thongs, leotards, tights, headbands. They think marathon runners. They think embarrassing gym memberships. They think sweat, and for many of these ladies, sweat is an ugly, scary thing. So, they call it activity, and activity means parking a little further away from the mall. Activity means taking the stairs to the second floor instead of the elevator. Activity means strapping on a gadget that tracks how many steps they take, and increasing that number every day. Activity means taking the stroller out for a walk around the block after dinner, and these things are doable.
You learn to like egg whites, black beans, wheat bread and salsa. You start saying things only thin people say, like, "Whoa, that's too rich for me," and "I didn't save room for dessert" and "I'm eating a light lunch because we're going out for dinner." When you start hating food and your life, you learn to cook something new. When you want the carrot cake four days in a row, you have a piece on Saturday after weigh-in. When you know you'll be going out for sushi and sake with ten friends you make sure to get a twenty-minute run in beforehand, for activity points.
A month or so in, you find a different meeting with a funny leader. She makes you want to go. When you stop losing, she tells you it's perfect maintenance. When you gain, she's excited you came anyway and she tells you that you can't fail if you don't quit. When you lose, she says Con Grat U LAY Shuns! and you can tell she means it, even if you only lost point two pounds.
There are other reasons to go: every few weeks, you buy something else. A magazine, a food scale, a restaurant guide, a book of recipes, Crystal Lite, a ten-pack of weekly coupons with the eleventh week free.
Then, the best reason. At work, your pants almost fall down, so during lunch break, you go to Express and shuffle through the pants. You pick out the biggest size from the back of the rack, a size you have dreamed of fitting into for years, and take it to the dressing room. With trepidation and the little prayer to the loving God of your youth you pull the zipper – and it doesn't fit. It's too big.
With more joy than is civilized you tell the annoying knocking salesgirl that you need a smaller size. This is a sentence you've heard other women say, in other dressing rooms everywhere you've lived, your whole life, but you've never had the opportunity to use it. The next size down slides on and zips up perfectly, plus your legs look amazing. They look like someone else's legs. They look like legs you'd be jealous of.
At the register, you tell the girl that you really needed a new pair, and as proof you pull the waistband of your current pants away from your hip. She weighs a total of about twelve pounds so she looks at you like you've told her a joke in Swahili. You let it go.
There are compliments, but you still see your problems. Some days you are one large problem area. Some days you blame everyone else. It's certainly your husband's fault that you gained weight this week; does he have to order eggs over easy and hash browns and bacon and sausage and toast and cover it in ketchup and tobasco and wash it down with hot chocolate while you poke at your egg whites and oatmeal?
You learn things about yourself. Like, that you don't want to eat a piece of the expensive French birthday cake at work. You want to eat the entire cake, alone in a stall in the clean bathroom down the hall. With your hands. And you want it violently, angrily. You're so pissed off, you have to take a walk. You want to hurt people, so instead you go down the elevator and out the clean lobby and clean glass doors and down the leaf-blown sidewalk and across the newly paved street at the freshly painted crosswalk and into the Starbucks which smells of coffee and spray cleaner and sounds like the Johnny Cash Starbucks compilation album, all of this to the rhythm of your just-broken in, unscuffed Franco Sarto pumps, the sounds they make different on each surface. You order a low fat caramel frappuchino with no whipped cream (four points) and then you go back to work, your shoes clack clack clack thock thock thock fump fump fump over concrete, marble and carpet.
At work, a girl decides she wants to lose weight so she eats yogurt. Every morning, she eats yogurt and complains because she hates yogurt. Finally one day you ask why she eats so much yogurt, every day, if she hates it, and she says because she has seen you eating yogurt and look how much weight you've lost. And you have to laugh. You eat yogurt because you like yogurt, you've always liked yogurt, and there are nonfat options that fit into your daily points. In fact, there is no space in your daily points for things you don't like to eat. You never realized before how many things you ate because they were there, things you didn't even like but you finished them right up.
The office girls try other things, too. There's a Special K diet. For two weeks, every cubicle but yours sports a large box of Special K with dried strawberries. There's a Hello Kitty water dispenser on another desk, and then there's an Atkins diet, thrice or four times removed (Atkins as explained by a cousin whose friend has a roommate who did the diet). But within weeks if not hours, they're back to McDonalds every day for lunch. You watch them fail and you say nothing. You don't even think anything, because you're fairly certain you'll fail, too.
As you lose, you lose daily points too, two at a time. At the end, you're down to twenty per day. Every milestone, there is a sticker or a keychain, and there are many milestones. When you speak up in the meeting, you get a silver star sticker. Every five pounds is a gold star sticker. When you lose the smaller number next to your big number, you get the biggest keychain. Then there are smaller things: a tiny pair of hands clapping with a 16 etched on for sixteen weeks on program, a star for meeting your goal weight, and a few weeks later, a key for becoming a lifetime member, after which you don't have to pay unless you gain more than two pounds over your goal.
The keychains are junk. They get scraped and broken and they fall off the cheap rings. You keep them, with your jewelry, because what you had to do was that difficult, that important. You don't tell anyone because you don't want them to know how important it was to you; that would make you shallow and vain.
More clothes shopping. You didn't know you'd wear size smalls, size mediums. You get your hair lightened. You wear lip gloss and you make sure your straps don't show. You paint your nails. The lotion on your legs has a gold shimmer, because you're showing them now. There is one discouraging trip to the mall: when your bra cups become way too big.
During the maintenance weeks you get to add two daily points if you lose weight, subtract two points if you gain. Then you finish, and you have to stand and make a speech and answer questions. You love it when the other people make lifetime, especially those who've lost a significant amount of weight, because they look fantastic but they're still scared, shy. Many wear baggy clothing. Their fat is still there, in their aura. What's great is, they look normal, all body types, slender now but none have transformed into sixteen-year old Cosmo models. These are mothers, grandmothers, fathers and brothers, secretaries and construction workers, people who had diabetes and heart disease and cholesterol counts through the roof, who now enjoy hiking with the retriever, afternoons at the park with their grandkids, the occasional footrace for some good cause, all things they never thought they'd accomplish. You want to take care of them. You want to take them shopping. And you want to know how they did it.
Everyone wants to know how. And throughout your tenure as a paying member of Weight Watchers, you've listened to dozens of lifetimers say the same thing: They followed the program, exercised, drank water. Everyone nods and the leader says something funny. But you're tired of that. Something's changed for you, something significant, and nobody outside of this meeting will understand it.
So you tell them you had a fight with your husband last week, and then you wrecked your brand-new car, and then there were problems at work. All true. This all happened by last Monday.
By Wednesday you'd eaten through weeks of points and every point made you feel better. But then you would stop feeling better and another point would make you feel better again. You ate your way through the pain and it worked just like it always had:
For awhile.
On Thursday you stop. You say to yourself in the clean work bathroom mirror, "This is not how I handle things anymore."
After work, you go to the store and pick up some trashy magazines. Anything with Britney on the cover will do. Also some Crest White Strips. You go home and read this trash, your teeth taking forever to whiten, upper first and then lower, because during this time you can't eat. After that you brush and floss and rinse so that the urge to eat goes away, and when it's dinnertime you eat with your husband and then you go to sleep.
You tell the people in the meeting all this. An older lady in the front row says, "White strips!" and you know you've made her very happy with this new idea. The leader says, "How many of us thought, when we got thin, that we'd never wreck our cars?" They laugh, you laugh, because deep down we all thought thin people lived charmed lives with no troubles, or at least that the answers would become clear when we hit that magic number.
You stop paying but you keep going to the meetings, even though you only have to go the first week of every month. You keep weighing in because you are still pretty sure you're going to fail. There was that time you put cheese on your salad. Okay, so you're putting cheese on your salad a lot now. Also, you don't count points so much anymore. You write the food down, not as maniacally as before. You can wing it awhile. You have the rhythm down. You know what it feels like to be hungry, you know when you're full, you know what foods are good for you and bad, you know which foods have to wait for the weekend, you know that the lower fat options often taste passable enough to enjoy. The pounds stay off, even fall off until you're a good seven pounds under your goal and you don't have to stress so much. You'll keep weighing in, and when you start gaining you'll write everything down again and rethink things.
The day they throw you out is sad. You feel rejected, even though it's your own fault. They don't throw you out, really; it just feels like it. They tell you to come back once you've given birth, that you'll get three free months to get back to normal then. The doctor tells you to gain a certain amount of weight; for you, it's the exact weight you lost.
You miss it. Every time you pass the Weight Watchers, you look in, sadly. But you will return. You will lose the weight, and you will become one of those ladies who have been thin so long, most of their acquaintances would be surprised to know that they attend these meetings. You did it once, and you will do it again.
Plus, you get ten extra points a day if you breastfeed.
Waking up is the worst. Seems that's all I ever do. I read in a pregnancy magazine that during the third trimester, the night feels like one long sleepwalk from bathroom to bed, and that's true, but there are other problems. Like turning over. The hips are loose, separated with the hormone Relaxin, getting ready for birth. The mattress pad used to feel so soft under me; now all I feel is the floor underneath. I wake with the ache in my hip. If I go to the bathroom then, I see my whole hip and thigh red in the mirror. When I go back to bed, I have to remember which side I was just sleeping on, which sounds like it would be easy, but all the disorientation from sleeping and not sleeping makes this difficult. I touch my hips and try to feel which one is hot from all the pooled blood. Having walked makes it hurt less. If I choose wrong, and fall asleep again on the same hip, I'll wake within a few minutes.
If I don't go to the bathroom, I start the process of turning over. One pillow between my legs and one under my belly must be readjusted. The ache in my hip turns to hot pain when I move to my back, and I feel the slow pops in my hip joints: one, two, three, four, five. The two knobs at the base of my spine complain with the sudden weight but I have to stay there a moment, to scoot and to place the pillows in the general direction of my landing.
There are nights when I'm doing this pretty much in my sleep, only a fifth awake, and this is where I give up on those nights. I only know because I wake up on my back and then the whole shebang hurts, because the pillows haven't been placed under my knees for support, and the weight has been bearing down on my spine. There's the added fear that the kid has lain on his own cord, blocking him from oxygen and suffocating him to death, though this will be more of a fear a little later in my pregnancy. This is the thought that fully wakes me, though, and sends me again over onto my side.
That last move, to the other side, isn't painful and indeed the aching hip gets all happy with the blood moving again and the weight off, but that's where the kid gets crabby. My belly doesn't follow me over like it used to. It lands next to me, and I only know it's part of me because I feel the lump of kid fall into the other side. He'd just managed to ball himself up in a nice comfortable position and now he has to figure it out again. For ten minutes or so, he thrashes around to find a good position. In the process, he may get distracted and play with his toes for awhile. I assume that's what he's doing; it sounds right, but it feels like he's jumping rope.
After all of this, I usually find if I haven't gone to the bathroom that the kid's repositioning has squeezed my bladder and I get up anyway. I'm in the bathroom on average of three times a night, sometimes more and, if I haven't been drinking my water, sometimes less. Last night, I reminded myself that there was a time when I could sleep all the way through the night. It's a distant memory.
If I haven't wakened Mr. Aran by this time, it's a damn miracle.
The sleeping part of the night is all dreaming. Some women dream of their unborn children; this is supposedly a big thing during pregnancy. I haven't done much of that, maybe because I have no reference. I have dreamed that I'm out on vacation and I remember I have a kid at home and it occurs to me, slow slow slow, that even newborns have to eat and oh yeah I'm supposed to be breastfeeding. So I rush home, sure he's dead, and find he's still alive but thin and gray and dying. Mostly, though, the dreams are lucid, stuff I think about to get myself into dreaming while I'm still awake, scratching my hands, dry from all the nightly hand washing. So there are warped sex dreams about other people, fake people. Usually I can't get them to seal the deal. They flirt and flirt and flirt and make out and cajole and talk and it's like puppets whose strings have become tangled. Like a skipping record, my subconscious sometimes can't take over and make the dream go after I've fallen asleep.
I dream of getting lost in houses I don't live in; I dream of water. I dream of doctor's appointments where I'm told I need to watch my weight and then given detailed, explicit directions on what to eat that I can't follow and can't remember. "Take this and put it in a pot and cover it and boil it down until this is gone and then add this and this..." and I'm nodding at the doctor because I'm afraid of him, or maybe I want him to think I've got it under control.
It's important, when I wake, to know what time it is. I don't know why, but I have to know.
In the morning, I'm tired and abused. I look like I've been up all night, and I probably have.
www.schellstudio.com
At Jordu's studio, the heads on the wall are altogether beautiful, disturbing, crazy. It makes you thankful that Jordu has taken up this work. Plenty of interesting, crazy people work in IT departments and you never get to see the monsters in their heads. Some who do art are no good at it and it's wasted. Jordu is a genius with no attention span, crazy and wonderful and brave, unafraid of his darkest bits. And there they are, all his dark bits, hanging on the walls and balanced on shelves. It makes you glad to be alive, to know there's this deeper part of humanity, especially after a long time around the Cosmo readers and the Camry drivers.
There's a fine layer of dust on surfaces and a purple fridge and a purple rectangle of carpet and a luxurious couch with purple throw pillows in the entryway. I want to take care of him, in this new way I have, with pride. I want to wipe up the dust, vacuum the purple carpet, because he, like Mr. Aran, is a genius and above that sort of maintenance.
Jordu tells his students about what he charges, which is all they want to know. They think they'll go work in movies, and one or two might. Probably none will be as independent as Jordu. They think they'll take this financial information and use it in their real lives but they're asking the wrong questions. They should be asking about the work itself, how much time he spends practicing, what his influences are, how many designs he bangs out a day on a project, what he considers failure. I'd ask about the people, who is bad or good to work with, who hires newbies, what the shops are like politically, what a director demands. I'd ask what he does for aching arms and fingers. When he knows a design is done, and when he gets the clicking in his brain that it's good.
We went to an Indian buffet with Jordu for lunch. I was amazed by three things: One, the spiciness of the green bumpy sauce with the vinegar, so spicy my mind opened up; Two, Jordu's excitement and weakness all out there for anyone to see, all these things most people have the civility and good sense to keep quiet; Three, that these grand artists listened to anything at all I had to say.
It amuses me to think that if someone broke in to this sculpture studio, they would take the computer equipment and leave the real treasures untouched.
This morning, I potted a dill and a tomato plant. I listened to a Fiona Apple album and sang to it while I picked up the living room, straightened out the couch and coffee table, cleared the dining table and sprayed it down with 409. I put dishes in the dishwasher and started it up, cleaned out the cat's bowls and refilled them, swept up the floor. I cleaned out the shower with scrubbing bubbles and a sponge and it felt good enough to watch the soap marks go away that I didn't mind nearly passing out from standing up too long. When I finally sat down I felt sick so I ate some oatmeal and felt better.
Outside it's gorgeous. I want to be out there walking or running, sweating in the heat. I want to have an excuse to walk out there: a dog or a kid with a stroller, or a place to go. I want to swim laps in the pool outside but I only have bikinis that don't fit anymore, plus the chlorine will strip my hair to green bits.
If I weren't pregnant, I would call Mr. Aran and say, "I want to hit the spinning class tonight," and he'd go to the weight room and do his thing while I pedaled to the blaring music. Then I'd go home and peel the clothes off me, take a well-earned shower, eat and collapse into bed. Life will never be quite like that again.
I'm just tired, maybe lonely. I had a hard time sleeping. There's no gritty, sweaty reason to shower anymore. When I stand straight and look down, I can't see my feet.
So, I might play WoW. Samus is in her forties, a middle-aged gal with no friends to play with. Mr. Aran has a million characters, all low-level, that I sometimes play in hopes that they'll catch up to Samus and we'll go cavorting around Azeroth together like in the good old days of beta. I miss the higher level lands and quests. The forties are goddamned slow, and my equipment is all old, from the Monastery, and I only solo. Every once in awhile I go to Tarren Mill out of sheer boredom and flay whatever's closest, get an HK or two. Someday, maybe, there'll be a Grunt before my name.
My new doctor has a whitening beard and this way of looking at me from the corner of his eye that suggests he has a wry sense of humor once he gets to know you. He's gentle and laid-back. The receptionist and the nurse are sweet. I listened to the kid's heartbeat again, and had my belly measured. The doctor said it was a little small, but he didn't seem worried. I don't know what that means.
It occurred to me this morning, while watching an overweight high school drama geek spend her summer going from zero to cheerleader on TV, that this is the first time in years that I have shrunk away from a challenge. The chick herself wasn't all that inspiring. She pissed and moaned and, I'm guessing, cheated on her diet. She had no energy or focus. She pulled it off in the end, but I couldn't help thinking that, at twenty-eight years old, I could do a better job.
It's all attitude. I've done amazing things with my life, things I never pictured myself doing. A year ago, I was ready to train to fight. And now, faced with this most normal of human enterprises, I would give up if I could.
What the hell? I'm the most capable person I know. People far less ready, with far fewer resources, have taken this on. Not only can I do this, I have no choice.
In my quest to give real pregnancy information, as well as gross you out as much as possible, I offer the following facts.
1) The advice sites say to try different positions and use lots of patience while having sex. I had no trouble during my first and second trimesters. During the first, I was sick as fuck but also horny as hell, all at once. I'd wake myself up from sleep-masturbating, then have to decide whether I should try to fall back asleep, finish myself off, or throw up. Second trimester, the hormones weren't so crazy but the energy came back and my boobs were awesome, so things went fairly normally, except I looked down more. Seventh month pops up and bam! Women in restaurants are giving me that angelic awwww smile, old ladies are congratulating me at church, and I have what feels like a squirming volleyball between me and my goddamn orgasm. Patience? Mr. Aran must spend half our sessions reviewing the Pythagorean Theorum in his head. I'm all in my rhythm, I'm talking dirty, things are good, then oof! The kid moves just right, I cramp up, cry out in pain, twist up, stop, stretch, breathe, scoot to the right, try to shove the kid back into place, then start again almost from scratch. Repeat.
2) When the kid moves, it doesn't feel like magic. It feels like that rolling, rumbling awfulness right before the diarrhea, except without the sick feeling.
3) Walking is fine, for awhile. You get tired remarkably easy. What's really weird is standing. You stand still for ten minutes and everything starts to go black. Something to do with circulation. It means you can't go looking through the maternity rack for that one garment that both does not cost more than your rent and also does not have that fugly thick blue band of obvious stretchy material around the waist. In lieu of passing out there on the floor of Ross Dress For Less, you figure you'll staple paper towels around yourself for the next three months. Would make cleaning easier, too. Spray some 409 on the floor and rub my boobs all over it. How's that for a mental picture?
I wish I had time for more grossness, but I have a long night of bathroom trips interrupted by catnaps coming up and I can't wait to get started.
In keeping with yesterday's Costco theme
There's nothing like feeling dirty, exhausted, unable to breathe, sore, with cramping in the hips and an unbeatable urge to nap, then realizing: "I have spent all morning shredding papers."
That's right. The action of taking paper from a folder and placing it into the teeth of a shredder for two hours has made me as tired as an afternoon with my trainer used to.
Not to mention, I had morning sickness today for the first time in months. In one swoop, I remembered all that horrid nausea. It didn't help, this time, to have a creature inside my fragile belly jumping all over the place like I was his own personal inflatable castle. I can't even bend over the steering wheel like I used to; I'm too big now. I said all my old little prayers: "Please get me home before I hurl. Please don't let me hit any bumps." The bass on talk radio was too much.
I laid down for a few minutes and eventually felt better. Doing a load of laundry and cleaning up is a luxury my body affords me only a couple hours at a time before demanding rest.
Finally. I'm able to take a deep breath again.
When did I become the kind of grownup tard who enjoys Costco? Today I threaded my way through a throng of nasty to get to a set of glasses ($20), a five-pack of baby onesies (50% off, $9) and a giant supreme pizza ($8, not bad tasting). Halfway through this excursion, I became so exhausted as to be almost ill. I leaned all the way over my cart to hold myself up. I remember giant boxes of garbage and sandwich bags melding together in my view.
I wanted to shop more, find out if they had other baby stuff at ridiculous prices, but I couldn't walk anymore. I didn't even do anything but walk.
These days I go from energetic to literally passing out, blammo fast. This kid is cannibalizing me.
